Category: people

Seattle Symphony executive director Deborah Card has been named president of the Chicago Symphony, replacing Henry Fogel. Card had a good 11-year run in Seattle. When she arrived from Los Angeles in 1992, at age 36, the “symphony had a $2.5 million accumulated deficit and was struggling to make its payroll every two weeks. Six years later, the symphony was debt-free, its endowment fund significantly increased and Benaroya Concert hall built.”

John van Rhein says that Deborah Card’s appointment as the new head of the CSO “suggests certain parallels with the 1985 hiring of [her predecessor, Henry Fogel,] who will step down after 18 years as CSO executive director to become president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, the New York-based service organization. In both cases, the CSO board, responding to internal financial challenges, turned to an executive from a second-tier orchestra with proven money-management and leadership skills who could turn things around quickly.”

For several years now, Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian intellectual Edward Said have been using their personal friendship to search for larger methods of bridging the gap between their two fundamentally opposed peoples. But perhaps more powerful than Barenboim’s music or Said’s words is their joint realization that these things alone are not enough to change the course of the Middle East. Instead, they believe in humanizing each other, for all the world to see. “What is striking about these two friends… is how different they are. Not because one is an Israeli, one a Palestinian – they are, as individuals, temperamentally opposed: one, easy, expansive, the other, Said, more cautious, despite his outspokenness.”

Australian Broadcasting Company chairman Donald McDonald is something of a mystery. He gives few interviews, preferring “to decline to comment”. But its been a turbulent time at ABC, and McDonald decides to go public. Why take such a difficult job? “I was a child of the ABC in that it was a big window in my life. It never occurred that anyone would ask me to be chairman so I just said yes. Why not? Why not follow your intuition?”

Michael Kelly, editor-at-large of the Atlantic Monthly, has been killed in a Humvee accident in Iraq. “Kelly is credited with revitalizing the respected but sometimes dull Atlantic, which won three National Magazine Awards last year and carried many high-profile cover stories, including a three-part series on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. He took the reins after Washington businessman David Bradley bought the Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman in 1999. Kelly stepped down as editor last fall and also planned to write a book about the history of the steel industry.”

Who is Charles Saatchi? The most important figure in British art in the 1990s. The Guardian has packaged a portrait of Saatchi – the artists he’s discovered and helped, the art he’s championed…

Dana Gioia is the new head man at the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s been a fairly thankless job for the last decade or so, ever since the agency came under congressional fire for funding a few controversial artists in the early 1990s. Gioia admits that his toughest task may be to somehow craft a new image for the NEA, while also working to reestablish it as the preeminent funding institution in the American arts world, something it hasn’t been in quite some time. This objective is further complicated by the strange nature of current events: state governments nationwide are slashing their arts budgets and artists are coming under public fire for their opposition to the war in Iraq.

Quincy Troupe’s fall from his position at the University of California, San Diego after he lied on his resume “raises questions about whether academic credentials really matter in certain fields, like poetry and art. Should one lie ruin someone’s credibility and career? Some say there’s no question that it should. Plagiarism, faking academic credentials, stealing research – all deal a serious blow to academic integrity, and a high price must be exacted. Mr. Troupe is hardly the first professor or college administrator to be caught fabricating his résumé.”

Margaret Atwood is a a great admirer of America. Or at least she used to be. “You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time. You are not only our neighbours: In many cases – mine, for instance – you are also our blood relations, our colleagues, and our personal friends. But although we’ve had a ringside seat, we’ve never understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel.”

Evgeny Kissen was the child everyone was talking about in the early 90s. Now he’s 31, and “he has avoided the Icarian fate of many prodigies, some of whom have faded into obscurity with aching hands and broken hearts. His key to surviving the transition from wunderkind to adult virtuoso, under the eyes and ears of a public whose fascination often calls for superhuman displays of technical wizardry, was moderation.” He limits his concerts to 40-45 a year.